


Static When You Try To Sleep

by kiiouex



Series: The Taste Of Teeth [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Lucid Dreaming, M/M, Mentions of Death, Reality Awareness Issues, Sleep Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-08
Updated: 2015-08-08
Packaged: 2018-04-13 14:51:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4526292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dipper wondered when the last time he'd been awake actually was.</p><p>Or, Bill tries to force Dipper to make a deal with him by trapping him in a long series of dreams almost indistinguishable from reality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Static When You Try To Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> This is an alternative to sock opera; I'm a big fan of the theory that Dipper was asleep when the laptop hit it's arbitrary password limit! It also isn't a very strongly BillDip story, it's more of a prelude to their later relationship, but it's really much more about Dipper coping with nightmares than romance >>;; I've been working on this for a long time, and I'm really pleased with how it's come out (and that it's finished!) Let me know if you have any comments or feedback =)
> 
> And a huge thanks to the lovely [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) for beta-ing, this story is much better for her contributions.

FAIL, four letter word approximately 88100 out of 456976 possible combinations, had been sitting on the screen for some time while Dipper blinked at it. He thought he must have already tried it, back when they had been going through lists of real words, but he couldn't remember. He hit enter, and the password reject screen buzzed up before him. The red glow hurt his tired eyes, and he envied Mabel, sleeping on the other side of the attic. The thought of wasted time kept Dipper awake, and if he was awake he thought he ought to be working, even as his head swam and his eyes watered.

Dipper typed 'fail' in again, hit enter, didn't realise the mistake until the rejection reared up again. He thought they should have just started with alphabetical combinations instead of trying random words, he thought it was silly that he'd tried to guess what was meaningful to the author and now he had to type everything in again because checking the mounds of records of what they'd tried would take longer than just typing it out again anyway.

He shook his head to clear it and the room seemed to shake with the motion, a weird rumbling drone ceaseless in his ears. He was getting too tired to function, let alone work, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. Dipper typed 'faim' and the earth cracked open.

He screamed as the earthquake split the floorboards apart, the attic warping as tremors ate up the sides of the building, reaching the roof in a second. Dipper dove for Mabel but his half of the room tipped up and back and he couldn't reach her, everything swallowed in the rip of splintering wood and rumbling earth.

The fall was chaos, Dipper slamming into walls and bits of ceiling without knowing which way was up or where he was in relation to the ground, just dizzy panic as he tried to hold on to anything that wouldn’t be wrenched away. It was a long time before things settled, a long time before he could push himself up on his elbows, ignoring a throbbing gash on his leg to see the ravine where the shack had been, see Mabel tangled in the rubble a dozen meters away, see the unnatural way her head hung on her neck, that she didn't move, didn't breathe.

A low creak, and some of the beams sagged, forming a triangle of wrecked wood with Bill Cipher’s eye blinking in the middle. “Wow, kid, this place is a mess.”

“Did you do this?” Dipper accused, hoarse and shaky.

“As much as I’d love to take credit, this one’s all the earth.” Bill drifted over, surveying the damage, the still body of Mabel. "Looks like you got unlucky. Quakes that big are pretty rare around here."

Dipper felt the demon’s eye on him as desperately tried to keep his panic down. There was still a chance, he thought, turning to the demon. He didn't have to process the shack or Mabel, didn't have to focus on it or accept it if he could undo it. Bill was powerful, right? Powerful enough to reverse this?

"Can you bring them back?" Dipper asked, and his voice didn't sound real to him, sounded too calm for the wild terror pumping through him. In the distance, he thought he could hear sirens.

"Sure can," Bill replied, sounding as careless as ever but with an odd edge to his tone, "But you know how this deal thing works, you want Shooting Star’s head back on straight, you need to give me something back."

"Anything," Dipper replied. There was no doubt. He needed to see Mabel out of the rubble, needed to see her whole again, and Stan must be under there somewhere too. The sirens were getting louder, and he wondered if it was an ambulance that didn't realise how useless it was. There was a rumble on the horizon that Dipper hoped wasn’t another earthquake coming.

"I want you to pledge yourself to me," Bill said, and it was hard to tell with his source-less voice but there was an odd inflection, an air of urgency. "Be my servant, Pine Tree, and I’ll make it like this never happened."

Dipper hesitated, because he’d meant it when he said _anything_ but what kind of condition was that?

“Hurry up, Pine Tree, you don’t want them starting to rot, do you?”

Something was wrong, and Dipper didn't have the faculty to work it out, not with Mabel dead and limp, but Bill’s urgency was rubbing him the wrong way, why would Bill be in a hurry? Why did he want Dipper? He couldn't understand what was happening. The ground started to move underneath him, he felt sick and disoriented and everything was too much too quickly, he couldn’t handle a second quake right after the first, couldn’t answer the demon, could only cling to the ground as it began to shake.

" _Hurry up_ ," Bill screeched, a red and white inferno, and his voice took over every one of Dipper's senses clanging around in his brain, overwhelming, and then the ground surged too fast, shook the world and everything in it until it all fell apart.

He woke up.

The shaking had been Mabel shoving against his shoulder, the siren his alarm clock. He shut it off with one hand, still bleary and dizzy because the dream had been so real. Through the window he could see weak morning light, around him the attic stood with no rends in the floorboards, and at the foot of his bed, the laptop, 'fail' blinking at him on the screen.

"You're working too hard, Bro," Mabel told him. She was alive, pink-cheeked and looking worried, with her head at a wholly reassuring angle. "I told you I'll keep helping, but I need things like food and sleep. So do you!"

"I didn't even realise I'd fallen asleep," Dipper replied. The transition had been seamless, he couldn't guess the moment the dream had taken over. It had been so vivid - lucid was the word, wasn't it? He hadn't been able to tell that he wasn’t awake, hadn’t felt an ounce of control like lucid dreams were meant to afford. He rubbed his leg, but the pain and the gash were gone, leaving nothing of his nightmare but weird memories.

He was still quiet over breakfast, the images too fresh in his head to let him relax even as the tremors left him. Bill's presence in his dream was the truly unsettling part, but Dipper knew he hadn’t invoked the demon, could only hope it was a coincidence born of his overtired mind.

As much as he wanted to get back to the laptop and chip away at the four hundred thousand possible combinations, Grunkle Stan insisted that they worked for food and board and job experience that would look great on their resumes in six years, and he had to spend the day behind the counter downstairs. It was dreary work, time barely seeming to move as he sat with head propped in both hands in front of the cash register. Customers were few and far between, the light in the storage room didn't work, and all he could do was drum his restless fingers against the desk until he was relieved of duty at three.

Mabel had pledged her assistance to him for the evening so long as she got to go out with her friends in the afternoon, and Dipper climbed the stairs to the attic alone. The afternoon light filtered in through the triangular window beautifully, outlining the shape in gold on the floor. As Dipper watched, it lifted cleanly up from the wooden boards, leaving a pitch mark in its place, slowly rotating until it floated before Dipper.

"Hey, kid."

Dipper took a step back defensively, wishing he had something to hold up to give him the illusion of protection, wishing Bill wasn't between him and the laptop on his nightstand. He hadn't summoned Bill so the demon had no power or influence, surely? Maybe? Sounding braver than he felt, he asked, “Was it _actually_ you last night, or was it an actual nightmare?” He tried not to let his voice waver under Bill's gaze.

“Are you trying to say you’ve been dreaming about me, Pine Tree?”

Dipper frowned; if it _had_ been Bill, then he’d been trying to trick him into making a deal while still asleep, which was completely terrifying and he doubted Bill would admit to it. He had the ominous feeling that deals made while he was sleeping would still count. “So what do you want now?”

"Not much," Bill replied, sounding absolutely chipper. "Came to make you an offer, actually, one stacked heavily in your favour."

Dipper wondered if it was the same Bill from his dream, the one who had been so desperate to make a contract with him. Not that Bill's 'generous' offer was going to be so anyway, but this made it even more dubious. Dipper tried to sound properly sceptical as he asked, "You’re not trying to trick me again? What can _you_ offer that I want?”

"The password to this laptop," Bill said, rapping the top of the computer with his cane, hard enough for Dipper to hear it and wince. “Pretty big solution space for that thing. I can save you a _lot_ of time.”

A time saver was so far removed from a life-or-death offer that Dipper doubted the exchange could be worth it, but couldn’t see the harm in just hearing what was on offer. “And you want…?”

"I want you, kid! As my servant, following my orders, effecting physical change with your flesh body on my behalf, all that kind of thing!"

“What?" Dipper stared, but the demon didn’t even blink, apparently dead serious. Dipper tried to push back all the memories of his nightmare to focus on what was real, right in front of him, handle the demon in his bedroom. He really couldn’t figure it out. “Why?”

Bill counted his points off on his fingers, adding more digits to his hand as he needed. "You're smart, resourceful, persistent, already the second-biggest expert on the secrets of this place, not great for looks but age might improve that, and if you're on the right side you might make a good pawn. I’d rather keep you around than have to ‘deal’ with you, you know what I mean kid? So. Be mine."

Dipper didn't even need a second to consider. "There are only so many passwords it could be," he said, and he should have started realising the danger the second he began to sound smug, "I'll get it eventually."

Bill hummed, twirling his cane in a mocking gesture of thought. "You think you can try them all?" He asked. "Even though you can only input passwords when you're awake?"

"What -" Dipper started, but the world around him started to waver, the air thinning and colours starting to blur together.

"Let me know when you want to wake up!" Bill called cheerfully, and then the attic was gone, honey gold afternoon light blurring to white nothingness.

He woke up.

Dipper’s eyes opened half an inch away from the wooden counter in the shack's shop. He blinked slowly, trying to work out what had happened, glad the store was empty of customers and that Mabel was already sitting beside him, grinning like she’d been waiting for him to wake up.

"Grunkle Stan's gonna be mad if he catches you sleeping at work," Mabel said, laughing brightly as Dipper groaned and rubbed his eyes. "Are you that tired?"

"Yeah," Dipper murmured. "I told you about that dream... I didn't sleep well last night." He looked at the clock beside him, numbers seeming to shift as green blobs before his bleary eyes before they settled on 2:50. He glanced over at Mabel, still grinning at him while she knitted a black and white interrobang sweater, and asked, "Weren't you out today?"

She cocked her head and barely skipped a beat, telling him, "Nope; that's tomorrow."

"Oh." Dipper looked at the clock again and decided it was close enough to the end of his shift that he could tag Wendy in for her turn at the completely empty store. "Do you want to get back to doing passwords?"

They spent the next three hours on fail, faim, fain and about four hundred other incorrect combinations. After dinner, and Dipper’s weakest attempt at the mashed potato sculpture contest to date, Mabel declared that sitting in the attic playing codebreaker for extreme amateurs was too boring and they moved downstairs, stretching out before the TV. Dipper kept a meticulous record of everything Mabel typed and made sure she didn't miss one. She didn't, droning out the alphabet through their endless iterations. The film playing was hard to follow with only half an ear and whenever Dipper glanced up the monster had changed from a vampire to a ghost to a werewolf. It was still early evening but he couldn’t help noticing how tired he was, how his head was starting to fall closer to his chest as he thought he might just nod off in front of the TV. But he had to stay awake, tracking farp to farq to farr...

"Dipper," Grunkle Stan yelled from somewhere else in the house, voice distorted by distance.

The sound helped Dipper wake up, at least, as he slowly pushed himself up onto his knees. "What does he want?"

"What does who want?" Mabel asked, the fuchsia of her sweater reflected obnoxiously onto the screen.

"Grunkle Stan," Dipper said, in time to hear his own name shouted across the house again. Mabel's expression stayed blank. "Don't you hear that?"

She cocked her head, said "No," and then it was the rumble of the earthquake again, Mabel and laptop and TV all blurring together and disappearing.

He woke up.

There was a hand on his shoulder and his forehead was stuck to the counter. It was dark out, past the shop’s closing, and the stiff soreness of Dipper’s knees and back told him he’d been sleeping for a long time.

"Kid," Grunkle Stan said, a scant hint of paternal concern in his tone, "you're lucky it’s the off season and you can get away with it, but you'd better not sleep on the job again. Go to bed earlier or something."

“Uh. Yeah,” Dipper said, rubbing his eyes. He thought he could feel the low pulse of a headache building behind his eyes, and there was definitely a red mark where he’d been lying against the counter for apparently _hours_. “Sorry, Grunkle Stan.”

His Grunkle grunted and left, leaving Dipper to pry himself off his chair and wobble upstairs on his dead limbs. He stopped in the bathroom on his way up to splash cold water in his face and swallow down some painkillers for the burgeoning starburst in his head. Staring in the mirror, hands gripping the edges of the sink, he thought he should be able to _tell_ it was real, that the cool porcelain under his fingers existed, that it couldn’t just be all in his head. But, it hadn’t felt fake before. He headed up to the attic.

"It’s too weird, Mabel," Dipper said, running his hands through his hair. "I keep waking up and I never even notice when I fall asleep. I just can’t _tell_ what’s real, it's scary, it's -" he cut himself off, reaching the obvious conclusion. Mabel was watching him pace, bright and attentive, and everything about her felt familiar. But she had before, too. "How do I know I'm not dreaming now?"

"Try pinching yourself," she suggested, giggling as Dipper nipped his skin to no effect. "I don't think you are dreaming, though! Because if this is your dream then I'm not real, and I don’t _feel_ made up!"

"But how do _I_ know that?"

Neither of them had an answer.

The laptop was back to 'fail' and the idea of repeating all their progress - and the chance that that progress might prove pointless once again - was too much. Dipper resolved to take a little time away from the laptop, get some distance, and in the morning when he was properly awake he could tackle things head on again.

It wasn't like he was going to write the day’s dreams off - obviously there was something messing with his head - but he was exhausted, all his dreams keeping his mind too busy to rest and his barely contained headache threatening to intensify if he tried anything strenuous that night. So he lay on his bed and flicked through the journal, found some new nuggets of information he'd never noticed before, and slowly his fear of the world dissolving around him began to ease.

He went to bed before Mabel, lying on his back and feeling himself melt into the mattress. He resolved this time to get a good night’s sleep, and every part of him was so desperate for rest it didn't take long for him to slip away.

He woke up.

It was the middle of the night, attic shadowy and Mabel's breathing gentle and measured from across the room. Dipper wondered why he had woken when his head and limbs still felt so leaden, turning to the clock like the time might be a clue. The numbers swirled in nonsense patterns, not even following their figure-eight grid, and Dipper knew he was dreaming. At least he knew how he'd fallen asleep this time, but it was a small comfort.

He ran through his options quickly. He could try to wait out the dream, to fall asleep again and see where that got him, or... he could explore. Nothing could harm him in a dream, and there might be something to find, some hint about how he could get out of whatever dream trap he was in.

Besides, he was willing to bet there was a certain demon around.

Sliding out of bed, Dipper spared a glance at the figure of his sleeping sister before heading for the door. He actually knew it wasn't her this time and it unnerved him too much to want to deal with her.

He shut the attic door behind him out of habit before trying to remind himself that it was a dream and his actions really didn't matter for once. Wanton destruction was wholly possible - but still unappealing. Dipper headed out to the roof, feeling the surreal silence of the shack around him.

Maybe it was because he knew he was dreaming but the world felt less real around the edges. The shingles of the roof were solid underfoot, but Dipper couldn't shake the feeling that if he turned his head fast enough he'd catch the world wavering, flickering before settling on what to show him. But it was a perfect recreation of the shack for now, a pointless replica that he didn't have time for.

"Bill," Dipper shouted at the moon, "I know you're here! Why don't you just tell me what you’re doing?"

"If I appear, how do you know it’s not just because your dream put me here? It’s your brain, kid!" Bill shimmered into space before him, rising up from the huge peaked shadow of the shack’s roof. As an afterthought he added, "If you're so sure you're dreaming."

"Of course I am," Dipper snapped, defensive of his first chance at clarity.

Bill shrugged, eye fixing him with a look that Dipper told himself was not more sceptical than the few other expressions Bill was capable of. "If you insist," he said. "but you haven't been so sure any of the other times!"

"You're doing this, aren't you?" Dipper grated out. He was beyond exhaustion, too low on patience to handle Bill with the appropriate amount of delicacy. "Why won’t you stop it? Why won't you let me sleep?"

"Because you've been sticking your nose in places it doesn't belong," and even through Bill's screeching voice dipper could hear the demon’s amusement. "I need you to stop, and keeping you trapped in your own head seems like a great way to achieve that. If you want out, make the deal!"

"So you’ll keep me asleep, or you’ll make me sell you my soul so you can force me to stop anyway?

"Basically," Bill replied, eye gleaming. "Trust me, being mine is the nicest outcome for you. Plan B is letting you go mad in your own head! Plan C is the failsafe, but things won’t come to that."

Dipper hesitated. The dreams were exhausting but they didn't seem worth a sacrifice to end them. “No thanks,” he said, turning away and climbing back down into the shack. Bill didn’t yell any parting words, but Dipper thought he could feel the demon’s eye on him well after he’d shut the window behind him.

Awake in a dream without any real plan, Dipper thought he might try talking to ‘Mabel’ and see if he could find any obvious tells to set the projection apart from his sister. Since he’d come in from the roof, the air in the shack seemed still and dead, silence dragging along after him, and Dipped found himself hurrying up the stairs, keen for the safety of the attic.

He heard the rustle of leaves before he even opened the door, making the forest he found at the top of the stairs less of a shock and more of a disappointment. Moonlit woods had replaced his haven, and for all that Dipper knew he was dreaming and nothing _mattered_ , the illusion of safety still might have done him some good.

Everything seemed peaceful, both before him and behind, neither shack nor woods seeming inherently more threatening than the other. And Dipper doubted he could have gone back to sleep inside his dream anyway. He might as well wander and wait to wake up away from the oppressive stillness of the shack, away from the conspicuous absence of his actual family.

The door closed behind him when he stepped through, and it wasn’t there when he turned back to look, but that was expected; whether Bill was controlling his dream or it was rolling along on its own didn’t seem to matter. He was alone in the woods, and there was nothing to do but explore.

At first the woods were as he remembered them, though he’d never strayed far from the shack at night and they were a little too quiet; the summer bugs weren’t buzzing, and for all that the wind kept rustling the leaves, Dipper never felt a breeze. The trees and shrubs were interchangeable, indistinguishable, and he wended through them with no real heading supposing it didn’t really matter where he ended up. He was still feeling the exertion of his unending day, his headache had never really ended, and the movement of his feet just brought repetitive sights to his dry eyes.

But the further he walked, the more things fell apart. He wasn’t sure if it was the limits of his own imagination, or some real machination against him from an unknowable force, but it was almost with a jolt that he realised the shadows on the ground no longer matched the shadows cast from the trees, weird gaps in the light from the sickly-pale moon overhead.

He couldn’t have guessed when anything changed, but the new shadows seemed deliberately shaped, black figures painted on the ground. They weren’t even touching the trees or the underbrush, just lying on their own, human shaped, untethered and about Dipper's size. Were they even shadows? He crept close to the edge of one, trying to see how it darkened the grass under it and hoping to work up the nerve to touch it. The wind in the leaves was less of an occasional disturbance now, more of a long whisper in the background, and just as Dipper reached out to lay his hand on the shadow before him, he heard his own name.

" _Dipper._ " Mabel's voice, distorted by space and floating spectrally on the wind. The ground under his fingers was hard, charred, the shapes not shadows but scorch marks.

He bolted. It took a few dozen meters from the shadow for the worst of his wild fear to abate, and another ten before he found it in him to slow and stop. His pounding heart was from shock, he tried to tell himself, the surprise from hearing Mabel. But he hadn't _stopped_ hearing her, the sounds of the woods had all become whispers and every single voice was Mabel’s, drifting through the leaves, saying his name, begging him for something, pleading with him to wake, and soon her voice wasn't even coming from the world around him, it seemed to crawl out his ears, endless low and desperate entreaties. "Dipper, please..."

There was nothing he could do but walk on, no way for him to wake and assume control no matter how much he willed the woods to bend to him and Mabel's voice to silence. The scorch-shadows on the ground shifted as he passed, giggled, started to follow.

He tried to stay in the light, wary of the burned darkness between the trees that the shadows flitted in and out of, but the moon seemed to be getting dimmer, weak light thinning even more.

"Dipper..." Mabel's voice was still in his head though, and she sounded less gentle, more urgent, more... intent. Dipper felt his skin crawl as the darkness pressed in around him. The last lingering lights of the sky were turning black, and he could barely make out the grass burning in towards him, charring under the darkness like it was fire, just falling away under the encroaching shadows with a quiet hiss.

The moon went out, and the world went dark. He couldn't see his hand in front of his face, couldn't hear anything but his own panting breaths, could only feel his own hammering heartbeats. Two hands curled in on his shoulders, long thin fingers digging in deep enough to bruise. The whisper in his head was still Mabel but it had gone so wrong, it was Mabel from the bottom of the ocean and full of seething hate. " _Dipper._ "

He woke up.

Seeing the attic again was blessed relief and he ached for light like it was air, throwing back his cold-sweat sheets and hurling himself to the window, bathing in the early morning sun. It felt like healing on his skin, felt like it was washing off the isolation and the soot shadows that clung to him past the dream.

When he'd had enough time to breathe and feel calm again, he checked the clock; seven forty, and not even one of the numbers was spiralling wildly. Mabel's duvet was thrown back, her bed empty, and Dipper set out from the attic to find her, get the reassurance and goodwill she radiated. Making a deal with Bill was not tempting, but he didn't know how many more nightmares he could endure.

The lounge was empty. The kitchen was empty. The shop was empty, no one was outside, the car and golf cart were still in the driveway, and the light in the storeroom didn't work.

The miserable certainty sat in Dipper's gut like a rock, but he didn't want to acknowledge it, didn't want to lose the bright peace of the Mystery Shack in the morning. There were no ominous rumblings, no crawling nightmares, and Dipper poured himself a glass of juice and sat down at the table with the journal.

Familiar pages on gnomes and zombies greeted him, and he flicked through, wondering if he might have missed anything on dreams that could help him out. His thumb hit the edge of a page that felt too thick, and he pulled it apart, delighted to find a double-page spread on astral realms, the left one titled ‘the mindscape’. The first paragraph was a vague, meandering thing on the nature of dreaming, and Dipper sipped his juice, surprised at the sudden change in the author’s voice. When he looked back, the title was 'Fail' and the first paragraph was a synopsis of the first season of Ducktective.

The rest of the journal was the same. Every third page was the one on gnomes, and the ones in between changed whenever he looked away, inconsistent and incoherent, words changing between blinks whenever his brain challenged anything especially meaningless.

The stone in his gut fell away as he gave in to the truth. There was no point pretending he was awake. The juice had tasted funny, anyway.

It seemed a shame to leave such a gentle place behind for the dangerous unknown, but he couldn't stay. Slowly, Dipper lay his head down on the table and closed his eyes.

He woke up.

"Dipper!" Mabel's real voice, not distorted, accompanied by a nauseating tremor that it took Dipper's tired brain too long to identify as her shaking him half-out of his bed. "Wake up Dipper, it’s Saturday, ‘I Married A Mummy’ is on! Come on!"

He was so tired. It felt like he was at risk of falling asleep every time he blinked, it felt like there was a knife behind his left eye slowly twisting in, and shutting his eyes and pressing on his temples did almost nothing to abate the pain, but just enough that he kept his hand pressed to the side of his head all the same. It didn't matter what the clock read, the neon letters were too much for his sore, fuzzy eyes. And it didn't matter what the clock read because sooner or later he would sleep or he would wake and everything would vanish.

He went downstairs, and he lay on the floor in front of the television while ‘I Married A Mummy’ played out, just a series of flashing images that met his eyes but never made it through into his brain. Mabel brought the laptop down in what Dipper wasn't too petty to recognise as a beautiful gesture of solidarity, and offered to put in passwords while he reprised his role as fact checker.

"What are we up to?" He asked.

When she said 'fail' all he could do was laugh hoarsely into the rug. So nothing had been real. Or, this was fake and one of the others hadn't been a dream - and he couldn't know which. Mabel could sense something was wrong with him, but couldn't guess what - if she was even real, Dipper couldn't help but think, heavy with bitterness - and she started on the passwords anyway, running through the alphabet as she typed until her voice and the sound of the TV ran together into a meaningless drone. Dipper's everything ached, and he couldn't even see the point of fighting to stay awake in a world that only maybe existed outside of his head. He shut his eyes.

He woke up, in the woods at night, to a growl and a rumble deep enough to shake the trees and remind him that any injuries he sustained might not be real, but the pain would be. He ran.

It went on like that, and Dipper lost track of the transitions after the first dozen or so, couldn't count how many times he would suddenly wake up, revert to a place he'd never remembered falling asleep in. Relief at waking up wore out fast because he still couldn’t _tell_ if his surroundings were reality. Sometimes he’d spend a full day working in the shack only to find that every clock in the house was off by hours, sometimes he’d sit down to read only to find the page in front of him changing every time he blinked.

Sometimes, nothing went wrong, but he still had to fall asleep, still had to slide back into his own head, and he never even got to find out if it had been real. There was no way to mark his presence, no way to record where he’d been. He tried sleeping in stranger places, to see if he’d wake up in them again, but he woke up under the shop’s counter after having only considered the idea and realised his brain was working against him, filling in too many gaps for him, and he still couldn’t _tell_.

A confidant would make it so much more bearable, but he didn’t have one of those. He could tear out his hair and beg Mabel for help only to wake up a minute later with a Mabel who smiled like nothing was wrong. Five dreams later he'd see her again, and she'd talk about his nightmares like she had remembered, like she was real, but she wasn’t, she never was, her bright eyes and braces were all creations _in his head_ , all her sympathy and support worthless. He missed his sister, hated her simulacrum, alternated between ignoring her completely and quizzing her to find the inconsistencies that would give away the dream.

Sometimes he could find a glitch just by talking to her, but as the pulse behind his eyes deepened and concentration got harder, he tripped up more. He’d quiz her on some detail, get irritated when she’d go ten seconds without answering, then realise that he’d never actually said his question aloud.

He thought he was sleeping between dreams, sometimes it felt like more time passed between them, that his waking wasn’t instantaneous, but he was still running on nothing, words seeming to repeat in his head like a skipping record, words swimming before his eyes because he couldn’t work them into focus.

There was no way to rest. The woods were an occasional nightmare, but most of his time was spent in the dead summer air of the shack. Trying to lie down and sleep just moved him further on, any attempts at the laptop would have to be repeated, books and television were impossible to follow. He spent his time trying to hunt down the cracks in the world with as much hazy resolution he could muster. There was an idea he’d picked up from a brief foray into programming, that you could prove something was broken but you could never be completely sure it wasn’t. He couldn’t guarantee that just because he hadn’t found the fault in his reality _yet_ that it wasn’t a dream. Thoughts like that chased themselves around in his head, and Dipper found himself staring at clocks and counting to sixty to see if the minute would tick over properly.

He thought he might be going insane.

The idea of consequences fell away, and whenever frustration peaked too keenly he took it out on the furniture, on the walls, howling and screaming and smashing all the clocks he could find while Mabel stared and Stan shouted at him to stop, and it didn’t _matter_ because they weren’t real. He considered ‘ways out’, he thought about climbing to the top of the roof and just seeing what would _happen_ , only once he’d proven he was dreaming, once he knew it wouldn’t be real. It still felt real. He never worked up the nerve.

Bill’s offer lingered in the back of the mind, all the triangles of his home watching him as he paced and flicked dead lights on and off, because it was almost worth it, surely, he wasn’t going to be free either way so he might as well be _awake_. But it didn’t feel worth it, not just yet. Not even when he caught Mabel and Stan talking about him in hushed tones in the kitchen, like they knew and were real and were _worried_. But he caught sight of his own reflection, wobbly and distorted and with long slitted pupils in burning gold eyes.

Dipper wondered when the last time he'd been awake actually was.

He woke up.

He was lying in the lounge in front of the television, television blaring static, fuzzy hum thrumming in his ears, throbbing in time to his headache. The grain of the rug was printed into his face and he rubbed his fingers over the little grooves as he slowly sat up, stretching stiff muscles and looking around. The clock beside him read ‘fail’, green digits accusing, and Dipper couldn’t tell if it was still a sign or just a fact.

The air inside was always wrong, too still and heavy, lacking the proper old man smell Stan should have imbued it with. Dipper tried to shut off the television, but all pressing the buttons did was make the static screech louder. It was fine, he decided, leaving the room. He’d find Mabel and sit with her, indulge in the fantasy of normality. She wasn’t in their bedroom, or any other room, and Dipper celebrated his consignment to the empty shack with a trip to the medicine cabinet. Maybe fake painkillers could work some placebo effect magic on his very real headache.

It was the middle of the night, sky outside inky black, but Dipper didn't feel like staying in, sitting alone in an echo of his home. The woods were far enough from the shack that he didn't think they'd press in, not if he just sat outdoors a while. It would be dark, and quiet, and maybe he could get a _minute_ of sleep before the next dream took him, just a few seconds relief from the bleary ache in his head.  

He didn't realise until he opened the door that the darkness out the windows wasn't the sky. It was void, and it poured in like velvet, wrapping up every part of door and frame and starting along the floor. It had no texture, it had no depth, it was nothing, and it was crawling in.

Dipper ran, feeling far too tired for nightmares, legs stiff and heavy and faltering. It followed, consuming the stairs as he fled up them, a black hole swallowing the shack as he clambered out the window to the roof. From outside he could see the way it wrapped around the shack, ate up the walls and roof towards him, and he climbed higher, sore feet slipping on shingles as he reached the peak, watched as the darkness followed. He didn’t know what would happen if it touched him, was too _tired_ to panic properly.

Below he could see the lawn, untouched by shadows, but there was no way to climb down and it was far too high to jump. The chance he’d survive was miniscule. The void was eating its way towards him, a terrifying unknown, and Dipper was sick of being the victim in his _own head_ , didn’t have it left in him to be afraid. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.  

He jumped. Regret hit him his first second in the air because what had he been thinking, _it still felt real_ , fear and adrenaline pumping through him far too late to make up for the lapse in his survival instincts, and the ground was rising up before him too quickly to brace for. He'd known it would be too far.

He felt the impact shudder through him, heard the thud and the crack and then nothing.

He died.

He woke up.

Dipper lurched upright, panting and crying and feeling his neck, check the angle, checking every part of himself because he had felt it, he'd felt it but it hadn't been the end.

It was too much. He slid off the kitchen table and stared upstairs, skirting the window to the roof, not letting his hands touch anywhere the shadows had been. It was too much. "Bill," he called to the empty attic and he heard the quaver in his voice, clasped his hands together so they wouldn't shake. "I know you're listening! Come out!"

The silence that followed was just long enough to make Dipper panic. He didn’t know how to invoke Bill, didn’t know how to contact him outside of screaming his name, what if he couldn’t find him, what if he really was _trapped_? But the familiar, hideous laugh starting filling the room, more welcome than it had ever been before.

"That's all it takes to rattle you, Pine Tree?" Bill asked, voice proceeding him as the demon’s body slowly manifested from the window frame. "One little fall?"

"You win," Dipper said. "I can't – If I stay here, and I just _die_ , over and over… I'd go insane, I can’t, I need to get out."

"It might be more fun if you’re crazy," Bill replied, smug satisfaction seeping out through his words. "You already know what I want. Say it, kid!"

"Promise I'll wake up," Dipper demanded in a voice that was little more than a croak. "Promise this will never happen again."

There was a gleam in Bill's eye, but it was hard to read a face with one feature. "I guarantee it."

"Then..." Dipper swallowed hard, feeling the thrum of his headache and his still racing heart. He missed his sister. He missed the assurance of reality. The price finally felt like a fair exchange. "Then, I'm yours."

He put out a hand and Bill shook it, a black prickle of void where they touched. Dipper shivered, but Bill was positively glowing with delight. "That's a deal, kid! I'll come see you in the real world _real_ soon, but for now, you get some rest! You look awful! Have you been getting enough sleep?"

He howled with laughter, but Dipper was starting to feel weightless, restless, the room around him seeming less substantial. The deal was probably going to ruin him worse than the dreams had, but as the world started to fall apart around him all he could feel was relief.

He woke up.


End file.
